Palouse, Pullman reveal big rewards in surprising places

View full sizeJamie Francis/The OregonianThe rolling hills of the Palouse are painted green with the early wheat crop of spring.

Small surprises make the Palouse a big delight.

Famous for its rolling hills, mostly planted in wheat or lentils, the landscape astride the southeast Washington/north-central Idaho border is not your typical Northwest vacation mecca.

The Palouse doesn't have jagged peaks. The only lake is a torpid reservoir on the Snake River. And its one free-flowing river is so unpredictable when a chinook wind melts winter snow that the seat of Whitman County put the river in a concrete trough.

Best known for its twin university towns, Pullman and Moscow, the Palouse hides its delights in unexpected places.

How unexpected?

How about the 3.5 million mounted insects of the James Entomological Collection tucked away, in all places, inside the Food Science and Human Nutrition building on the Washington State University campus. The staff says local school kids love to visit the cockroaches.

Fortunately, there is no need to dine on the university collection of dead bugs because right next door is Ferdinand's Ice Cream Shoppe, with its delectable Cougar Gold cheese and other dairy products made from the college cows.

One of the biggest surprises in the Palouse is the Dodge "dealership" in the town of Palouse, which has maintained a steady population of about 1,000 since 1890.

Baggot Motors, in business since 1929, still services local cars and probably sells a few used ones. The display in its brick showroom is something that Portland's Ron Tonkin Dodge must envy.

Baggot has one car in the window: a 1966 Dodge Charger, with a 383-cubic inch four-barrel. It looks like it could scream.

Beyond its college towns, the Palouse is known among travelers as a unique setting for photographing its rolling hills. At certain times of the year, photographers swoop in like grasshoppers.

High-priced professionals battle each other to sell their photo seminars. One week they pitch the Southwest's light and color of Santa Fe, the next the charm of San Miguel de Allende in Mexico, then the Palouse.

Colfax, that town with the concrete river, has a Best Western Plus motel, hardly something one would expect in a town of 2,800. But as the front desk clerk explained, every room was booked in June and would stay that way until the photographers got done shooting.

The motel cash register was filled with the same color as the surrounding hills.

The most famous of those hills is Steptoe Butte, a National Natural Landmark just north of Colfax. First light, as seen from the butte on a June day, is why the Best Western crew puts out its breakfast spread at 4 a.m.

The 3,612-foot high butte rises 1,000 feet above the surrounding landscape. A road to the top provides a view for dozens of miles in all directions.

Small, rolling hills extend as far as the eye can see. Made of loess, the incredibly rich soil was left behind by ancient glaciers and piled by wind into hills. This part of the Palouse escaped scouring by the ice age floods that created scablands not far to the west, including the famous Palouse Falls on the Palouse River.

The fertile soil makes the Palouse one of the world's most productive regions for growing wheat. The contours of the cultivated fields create interesting geometrical patterns in images the photographers take home.

When their digital memory cards fill up, photographers head back to the motel to download them, then fan out across Whitman and Latah counties looking for more subjects.

They find barns to photograph, farm ponds, farm machinery and elephants. Yes, the circus was in town at the Palouse Empire Fairgrounds.

The famous fence of 1,000 steel wheels at the Dahmen Barn in Uniontown (now an artists' studio) is high on photographers' lists. So are the brick buildings and outside art on the two college campuses, only eight miles apart. Their proximity makes the Palouse the only place in the country with major universities of two states so close together.

WSU and the University of Idaho serve 32,000 students in towns where the combined population is 54,000. Yes, the Cougars and Vandals are often patsies for conference opponents in sports, but there is more to a college than the quality of its athletic teams.

Moscow feels like a real town, laid out in a grid fashion on mostly flat land. It would likely be a small farm supply town even without a university, which is tucked nicely on the southwest side of town.

Pullman, by contrast, has an unreal feel, located at the bottom of hills and these days spilling over the skylines. The largest university between Seattle and Minneapolis dominates a town that likely would have the population of Palouse if the state agricultural college hadn't been sited there in 1890.

Many of the Palouse's best surprises are hidden away on the WSU campus. A cautionary warning, however, is in order. Summer semester, when most students are away, may seem like a good time to visit, but not everything will be open.

The Museum of Anthropology, with its fossil record of prehistoric peoples of the lower Snake River, had a sign on the locked door saying the staff was on vacation. The famous residents of the WSU Grizzly Bear Center couldn't leave town, but they sleep away the heat of the day in a shady den.

Persistence does pay dividends.

The Conner Museum in Abelson Hall is wide open for visitors to walk in. The zoology museum has more than 700 mounts of birds and mammals, the largest public collection in the Northwest. Most impressive is the grand slam of North American bighorn hunting, with full mounts of the desert, Stone, Dall and Rocky Mountain sheep.

Upstairs on the building's roof is a tropical greenhouse. It's like taking an elevator to Thailand to see the orchids.

The Robert P. Worthman veterinary teaching exhibit in McCoy Hall is a bit creepy, with displays of two-headed lambs, piglets and calves, animals born as Cyclops instead of having two eyes and displays of various stages of dissection.

Vet students need to learn somewhere.

The Jacklin Petrified Wood Collection and related exhibits in the Webster Physical Science Building impress rock lovers. They display minerals from around the world, including many from Oregon (geodes from Burns and Heppner, petrified oak from Stinking Water Mountain and tree casts from Hampton Butte).

The College of Communications, named for Edward R. Murrow (a 1930 graduate), displays the door of the CBS journalist's office from New York, as well as more of his memorabilia.

While driving around campus, a 15-foot-tall statute of a cougar on a pedestal catches the eye. Cougar Pride was molded at Soderberg Bronze Works in Portland, then cast at Valley Bronze in Joseph, before taking up residence outside the football stadium in 2008.

The Museum of Art is another victim of summer in Pullman. Said to have the largest collection of art in eastern Washington, the museum's only open exhibit was of how local artist Patrick Siler is creating a mural masterpiece downtown on an outside wall of a coffeehouse. This is one of the busiest, most eclectic murals you're likely to lay eyes on, with jazz saxophonists, a couple playing checkers and flying psychedelic sea creatures.

Downtown also has the Pullman Walk of Fame, with sidewalk plaques of famous people from Pullman. Locals would know them best, but a few in addition to Morrow stand out: sportscaster Keith Jackson, Gary Larson of "The Far Side" and quarterback John Elway. The Pro Football Hall of Famer played one year at Pullman High then, unfortunately for the Cougars, went to college at Stanford before winning two Super Bowls with the Denver Broncos.

You would think that if Elway has a plaque, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, a WSU dropout, would have one, too.

Also, the Cougars had some outstanding quarterbacks of their own. Drew Bledsoe and Mark Rypien have plaques, but oft-arrested Ryan Leaf doesn't, even though it was he who led the Cougars to their first Rose Bowl in 67 years in 1997.

After finding the summer closures on the WSU campus, Moscow seemed a better bet to have open attractions than the University of Idaho campus.

Moscow City Hall is more than a place to pay a parking ticket. It also serves as Third Street Art Gallery, featuring local and regional artists in the second- and third-floor hallways.

Moscow's biggest museum, the Appaloosa Heritage Center, celebrates the famous painted pony of the Palouse prairies, prized so highly for speed, endurance and gentleness by the native Nez Perce Tribe.

The museum celebrates all things appaloosa, from Prince Plaudit (who sired 637 registered foals), to "The Appaloosa," starring Marlon Brando. It even has an Appaloosa Beer, though it's brewed in Calgary, Canada.

Back in the days when thousands of appaloosas roamed free across the Palouse, "the grass was stirrup high and waved in the wind like waves on the ocean," according to an early settler.

It's still that way in the Palouse, though these days the waving grass is cultivated. That may be the least surprising thing about the fertile Palouse.

View full sizeJamie Francis/The OregonianThe door from CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow's New York office is displayed at the School of Communications at Washington State University.

Trip planner: The Palouse

Getting there: It's a 350-mile drive from Portland to Pullman. Alaska Airlines serves the Pullman-Moscow Regional Airport with flights from Seattle and Boise on a circular route that includes stops at Lewiston, Idaho.

Lodging: It's a chain kind of place. Best options are Best Western University Inn at Moscow (800-325-8765, uinnmoscow.com), Best Western Wheatland Inn at Colfax (509-397-0397, bestwestern.com) and Holiday Inn Express at Pullman (509-334-4437, hiexpress.com). The tight lodging during peak times will be eased with a new 127-room, Generation 9 Marriott Residence Inn adjacent to the WSU campus, due to open in fall 2013.

Colleges: Both have visitor attractions and numerous events of interest beyond the academic community. For Washington State University, start at the visitor center at 225 N. Grand Ave. to buy a parking pass; 509-335-4636, wsu.edu. For University of Idaho, start at the Parking Office at Third and Line streets; 208-885-6111, uidaho.edu.